The Barbie film they didn’t want you to see
May December director Todd Haynes’ student film, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, is a haunting biopic of the pop star and anorexia victim, acted out with Barbie dolls.
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story
YouTube
Both Barbie and Todd Haynes (for his brilliant film May December) are fixtures this awards season. With that in mind, it feels like an opportune time to bring up Haynes’ experimental 1985 student film, Superstar – a 43-minute biopic on Karen Carpenter, the singer and drummer of Carpenters. This film is entirely acted out by Barbie dolls, which have been made up to look like Karen and her brother and bandmate Richard, placed in meticulously hand-painted mid-century sets. It concerns itself with the last 17 years of Karen’s life, before she died of anorexia-related causes. As she succumbs to her illness, Haynes literally carves chunks out of the doll. Despite its kitsch and weirdness, this is a film that really sneaks up on you emotionally — it’s surreal, funny, and tragic. Superstar was banned from official circulation after Haynes lost a copyright lawsuit to Richard, who reportedly had the hump because the film insinuates that he was gay, over its use of uncleared Carpenters music. For years, this hallowed cult oddity was traded as a bootleg video; now, perhaps fittingly, it exists in low-quality clips on YouTube, which you can watch below.
Australia Uncovered: Hitler’s Jewish Soldier?
SBS on Demand
From February 8
The first instalment of the new season of SBS’s documentary series Australia Uncovered kicks off with the story of Hitler’s youngest soldier, Alex Kurzem. At the age of five, Alex watched from a tree as his entire village, including his family, was murdered by a German execution squad. Seeking refuge in the woods of Belorussia, he managed to eke out a life for several months before falling into the clutches of a Latvian SS battalion. In a chilling turn of events, they made him their child soldier, giving him a new identity complete with a fabricated name and birth date, along with a miniature SS uniform. Alex was eventually taken in by a Latvian chocolatier named Jekabs Dzenis and migrated to Australia in 1949. He kept his history a secret from his family for 50 years, only revealing it to them when he was dying of cancer. Unpacking whether or not this “stranger-than-fiction” story is true is the preoccupation of the director, Walkley-winning Dan Goldberg’s investigation. It’s riveting stuff.
Dance Life
Prime Video
Former dance kids should heed caution when watching Prime’s swish new docuseries, Dance Life. By episode two, you’ll be experiencing phantom blisters and ghostly wafts of Tiger Balm. This five-part series follows a group of students, local and international, on their final “make-or-break” full-time year at the Australian dance studio, Brent Street. We’re told early in the series that some 1800 applicants applied to the course; most don’t get in, and of those that do, some won’t survive it. The training regime is brutal, with upwards of eight hours of dancing a day, and the teachers are, frankly, terrifying. “Is everyone scared? So you should be,” barks choreographer Cassie Bartho, a hybrid of Lara Bingle and The Iron Lady. This documentary shines when it focuses on the inner lives of the students. One of them, Max O, shows the most potential, but as Brent Street’s owner/director says, because he is short, he’ll likely have a hard time getting booked. Watching this, you start to wonder whether there’s any point to dreaming at all.
Big Boys
Prime Video/Amazon Prime
Big Boys does something quite magical. It marries ripsnortingly funny, often completely filthy comedy with wise meditations on grief, mental illness, and sexuality. It is the best teen comedy this side of Sex Education. The show is based on the writer/comedian Jack Rooke’s life, who lost his father to cancer when he was 15 and fell into a year-long depression. Jack (Derry Girls’ Dylan Llewellyn) is gay, but yet to come out to his loving mother, Peggy. The two are tight, but she’s the kind of mum who is obsessed with finding him a lovely girl. Most of the action in this story takes place at Jack’s first year of university: him figuring out who he is, and making friends, particularly with Danny (Jon Pointing) — a Fred Perry Harrington jacket-donning, leery-beery boys boy, who has a surprisingly tender streak.
Trigger Point
Stan
Watch enough awards show streaming service coverage and you’ll eventually be bullied into watching one of the series that are ceaselessly promoted during ad breaks. The show in question is Trigger Point, a drama about a London bomb-disposal team, from the makers of Line of Duty. This has LOD puppetmaster Jed Mercurio’s mitts all over it: there is a major character who you are immediately charmed by that will dramatically be killed off; a scowling Vicky McClure, who is compulsively watchable despite essentially playing the same role that she did in Line of Duty (albeit with worse hair); and a mood of heightened anxiety that is only occasionally alleviated by banter. There are also so many bombs, a ludicrous amount. The first episode alone has four all plonked around the same council estate. If you’re after total adrenaline and something that asks you not to think too hard, this is the ticket.